Andreas:

Here's a variation of your idea that might work if the virus scanners
don't compain:

  make the last four bytes of the file specify the offset of the start
  of the image (i.e. the index of the first byte after the executable).

When you double-click on the file, it would start the Squeak VM as
usual. The Squeak VM would notice that no image file had been specified,
so it would read the final four bytes of the file to find the
start of the image data, and read the image file from there. I suppose
we'd also want to include a several byte tag (say "IMAG") before the
offset so Squeak would know that there reall was an image file attached
to the executable. The logic for noticing that there is no image file
specified is already there, I think.

	-- John

>> What if a Squeak VM file could recognize if an image file were simply
>> appended to it, and do the right thing?  Then it should take no more to
>> make a double-clickable app than to do a save followed by a file copy. 
>
>Sounds good!
>
>> OS gurus:  Can this be done simply on the Mac PPC, 68K, Windows, Unix,
>> OS/2, etc? 
>
>I just tried appending stuff to an executable on Win95 and I could start
>it. It's not fully clear how to find the image in the executable and I
>also assume that a number of virus scanners will complain about undeclared
>data in the executable, but in general it looks as if it works.
>
>Andreas